In this lecture, artist and educator Sanchayan Ghosh will present the unique history of Kala Bhavana Fine Arts Institute in Visva Bharati, Santiniketan, where he both studied and now teaches. Ghosh will explore contexts and frameworks that have shaped Santiniketan over the past 100 years, while also addressing current concerns related to its ongoing transformation as both a site and a cultural situation.
Kala Bhavana Fine Arts Institute was founded by Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore in 1919 as part of a larger education project in rural Bengal, India, to initiate an art programme that is a close engagement with its environment and the neighbouring landscape. It emerged through a critical engagement with the prevalent British colonial academism at that time, adopting an eclectic approach to practise drawing on different folk traditions and other traditions of modernism that fostered creative freedom and intercultural exchange. It proposed an internationalism deeply rooted to its context of the local and dynamic engagement with multiple art traditions globally.
Sanchayan Ghosh is an artist and educator from Kolkata with a background from Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan, where he currently works as an associate professor in the Department of Painting. Through his continuous exploration in site-specific interactive art practice, Ghosh has over the years been exploring workshop-based collective community dialogues. Ghosh has participated in prestigious events including Documenta 14 and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, and continues to shape pedagogy through collaborations with institutions like FICA (Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art).
Ghosh is participating in the Bergen Assembly and Bergen School of Architecture cross course program (29. Oct - 01. Nov) sharing the course, Exploring Tools for Site-Specific Dialogues: Learning with the Forest Way, with Larissa Fassler and Matskogen at Landås.
The event is free and open to all.
The Bergen Assembly office is universally accessible from street level and our toilets are gender neutral.
